THE BORDER REPORT

This poor bastard is a U.S. Border Patrol agent from Tucson sector who someone hit on the head with a broken cinderblock, Monday afternoon. The agent had walked up to the border wall west of Nogales to look at a hole when someone clambered up to the top of the wall from the Mexican side and dropped the block on his head. You have to give the Border Patrol credit for audacity. Even though the agent was hospitalized, Border Patrol officials still managed to take this photo of him and disseminate it to the media this morning. Along with the photo, this message from ever-persistent Tucson sector chief Ron Gilbert: "As we gain operational control of our border, smugglers and other types of criminal elements have become frustrated and the result is an increase in assaults." The man is immutable in his insistence that every incident that goes down on this border, good, bad or both, is one more clear signal that the Border Patrol is winning. It's not his fault of course, he has to say that, he has jefes too. And they've been boasting about operational control of the border since the Clinton era. I just hadn't seen them out drag out their wounded agents to try and illustrate the point before.